From the President

More Questions than Answers

By: Julie Fauble President, IOBA URL: http://www.centurybooks.com

I have more questions than answers these days. What will happen in this rapidly changing online used book market? How do I respond to these changes? What do I want my business to look like? What can I do to make my business better? So many questions and so many different answers, as many answers as there are booksellers.

I’m not going to give you any answers here. Instead, I want to talk about why we should keep asking the questions.

First and foremost, books are important. Books change the world. The history of ideas, the history of human progress, is the history of books.

In the present world of multi-media and digital wonders, the humble book is more vital than ever. Other media may be flashier or appeal more to our senses and need for stimuli, but it is a book that will slow us down long enough to think. It is a book that will connect to our higher mind, not just our emotions.

The printed word is essential as an archive, a repository. An e-book can be rewritten and leave no trace of its original. Web pages come and go with the click of a mouse. With a few more clicks, a photo can be rearranged. Put Hollywood technology to work, and history on film can be changed completely. All the goals of an Orwellian Ministry of Truth can be accomplished in the digital world.

Books do not so easily fall prey to this malleable reality. One cannot alter a book without leaving evidence behind, and if there is evidence of something removed, then there is someone somewhere who will seek out the original, seek out what the censors attempt to hide.

Books are essential to the soul. In a world of noisy, intrusive mass media, the soul needs the oneness, the intimacy, the quiet of a book. The human mind wasn’t created for the non-stop bombardment of modern living, the omnipresent whine of television and radio, the crush of humanity in the daily grind. The mind needs a break from all this, and for many, the quiet time spent reading a book is the only break they have. The book is their means of renewal.

When business is frustrating, when I wonder why I even bother, I bring myself back to this core: Books are important, and those of us who deal in them perform an important service to the world.

Some will say that’s idealistic nonsense, that one only need to look at the corporate entities coming in to see it’s just a business like any other. Don’t believe them. Books cannot be exchanged for widgets any more than a doctor could be exchanged for a plumber. The corporatization of the medical world doesn’t alter the doctors’ sacred charge to heal the body. No more should the changes in the book world alter our sacred charge to feed the mind and keep the histories.

Whether we are a seller, collector or reader and whether we deal in paperback romances or scholarly tomes, we all play a sacred role in the world of ideas. Remember that, and honor it.

With all the best for a peaceful and joyous holiday season,

Julie

Tom Sawyer – BookWriter Web

BookWriter Web: Getting Your Inventory Where it Belongs — In Front of Buyers!

Tom Sawyer is a co-founder of Interloc and Alibris. He served as Chief Software Engineer from 1993-2001. Over the years, he has developed many widely used programs for booksellers, including BookMaster, Record Manager, BookMate, and the UIEE format many of us use every day. Mr. Sawyer is now preparing to release BookWriter, which may well become the standard against which the next generation of bookseller software is measured. However, a little serendipity and a lot of work have yielded a surprise! Read on…* * * * * *

Tom, I was prepared to interview you about the release of BookWriter, but it sounds like BookWriter Web is actually a different program?

Yes — and no. BookWriter Web is now and will always be a working part of the complete BookWriter program. But, 3/4 of the way through its development, something unexpected happened: it became clear that the program was far more powerful than we had imagined, doing things we didn’t think could be done, producing results in seconds that would normally take hours or days to accomplish. I was floored.

After some discussion, we decided to retain these features in the full BookWriter program but also to immediately release BookWriter Web as a stand-alone program (at lower cost) for both BookMate™ and HomeBase™ users. Given the current state of the online book trade and the fact that any dealer with a BookMaster, Record Manager or BookMate-compatible database can use BwWeb immediately, we felt it was important to make this available to dealers as quickly as possible, particularly in time for the holiday season. The Alibris-compatible version is ready now and the HomeBase-compatible version will be released shortly.

What exactly does the program do?

BwWeb is a multi-functional composer that makes it very easy to effectively present your stock in venues like the web and auctions, using the data you have already entered. It will create just about any kind of document you can imagine, but where it really shines is its ability to compose complete, ready-to-publish web pages and auctions, with integrated images. It composes pages one right after the other, in sequence, and I’ll explain more later why that’s important. The general answer to your question is that the program’s main objective is to help dealers sell more books.

How does it work?

BwWeb retrieves selected records from your database and populates pre-defined locations in other files with your records. You can produces web pages, auctions, catalogs, tables, export files — just about anything you can think of. You can work from a Hit List, ranges of records, or select records directly within the program. There is a very wide range of options available for composition including automatic image layout and sizing. And, it displays the composed results instantly — you can preview what you’re about to do before you do it, to make sure everything is just the way you want it.

If I may say so, this sounds almost too good to be true. What are the advantages of using BwWeb?

I’ve spent a lot of time doing pragmatic testing and I’ve come to some interesting conclusions. Some may not agree with me, but I have good reasons for believing this:

1: When the vast majority of potential Internet customers want to buy an OP book, they go first to Yahoo, Google, AOL, MSN, or any of the major search engines that pop up on their computers when they first turn them on, or when they launch their Internet browser. They type the name of what they want into the Search box, hoping to find it. Usually, they either don’t find it or they end up at Amazon or B&N through a collateral link. This seems to happen the majority of the time and it’s common sense, isn’t it?

2: Practically no one knows anything about on-line OP book listing services. One out of a thousand people recognize the names ABE, BookFinder, ChooseBooks, etc. It’s an insulated little world and I believe this will take many years to change significantly. Alibris is far ahead of the pack in this regard because of the vast sums spent on advertising, branding and promotion, but their records don’t show up in search results either.

3: Most book dealers put their books in listing service databases. These databases are not indexed by major search engines. Hence, your database records do not appear in search results either.

So, to answer your question, there are many advantages to using BookWriter Web, but certainly one of the most important is the ability to get your inventory out in front of the people who want to buy it, without having to rely on sheer luck or having an OP book listing service to do it for you.

A lot of book dealers have created their own web sites but their sales results haven’t been what they had hoped. How will BookWriter Web improve this situation?

Frankly, I’ve looked at the source code for a lot of book dealer’s web sites and only a handful are actually set up correctly for proper search engine indexing. Most of them have their book records stored in non-indexable database files. That’s no surprise, that’s what most web programmers have been trained to do.

But, the reality is that in order for buyers to find your books through search engines, you have to have a significant presence in the search results that appear before potential customers. The only way to do that is to make it possible for your inventory to be indexed automatically by major search engines. This requires that your web pages be composed and structured in a particular way, and that the information to be indexed by the search engine must reside in your web pages, not merely in a Microsoft database or other “private” file.

Can you give me an example of what you mean by “significant presence?”

Ok, for example: In my spare time I created a web site for my parent’s antique & collectibles business called “B&D Unique Antiques.” I hosted the site through TIAS.com and made sure the pages were set up correctly so they would be properly indexed by search engines. Long ago before my time, they used to have kerosene heaters in automobiles. Suppose you were an antique car collector and wanted to buy one online? If you go to Yahoo/Google and type: “antique kerosene auto heater” you’ll get about 600 results — and B&D Unique Antiques inventory will appear near the top of the results list. We did not pay a cent for that exposure. So, B&D Unique Antiques has a significant presence not because we’re offering stuff no one else has, but because our inventory exists as static web pages that can be properly indexed by search engines. It makes all the difference in the world when it comes to sales.

On the other hand, if you go to any of the “mainstream” antique sites like Ruby Lane or CurioScape and type in the name of what you want in their own little Search box, you’ll probably find it right away. BUT, you’d need to know enough to go there in the first place, wouldn’t you? Most people don’t know anything about Ruby Lane or CurioScape or any of the “mainstream” antique sites. Like bookselling sites, they also live in their own insulated little world. So, since most people type what they want to buy rather than where they want to go to buy it, the majority of people who don’t know anything about these places won’t find them. But, if your records are properly presented, they will find your inventory.

It’s the same situation for booksellers. Here’s another example: A fairly common book is: “FDR: Centenary Remembrance,” published in 1982. Go to Yahoo/Google and type: “FDR Centenary Remembrance” and again, you’ll see our book listed near the top of the search results, even though there are hundreds of copies available on ABE and other listing service sites. None of those show up.

Very interesting indeed! Does this mean our inventory records will exist online as a series of static web pages and not as a single database file?

That’s exactly what it means. Unlike a database whose contents are “hidden” from internet search engines, pre-composed pages allow your records to be directly indexed by search engines. This means people looking in search engines for specific books will find your records. However, they will not find those belonging to other dealers whose records cannot be properly indexed — because they exist only in online databases.

Aside from containing the text, how do the pages created by BookWriter Web insure that they will be properly indexed by search engines?

Well, aside from the formatted text describing your records, you can also instruct the program to include an explicit Document Type Declaration and a complete set of formal Meta Tags in your composed web pages. These are extremely important for proper indexing and will insure that your records appear in the proper categories when retrieved by search engine robots. You can even include introductory information about your business, specialties, location, etc — and you will be found by buyers! BwWeb will even collect keywords from your records and include them as Meta Tags to provide alternative retrieval criteria for buyers who search by category rather than by title.

Don’t individual web pages require a lot of web space?

No, they don’t — that’s a common misconception. Individual, pre-composed web pages occupy about the same amount of space as a traditional web-based database and often occupy less space. Hence, there is no storage penalty to creating individual pages. However, you do need enough storage space to handle your entire inventory, but of all the things you have to pay for, web storage space is one of the cheapest.

What about retrieving and displaying web pages? Will customers experience any delays?

In fact, there is a huge performance increase over traditional ODBC database retrievals. Since each page is pre-composed, no database record retrievals are required. And, unlike an active server page that can take many seconds to compose a page on demand, pre-composed pages load instantly — there is zero latency beyond the normal load times for text and graphics. You might call it a horse-sense approach.

What about site setup and overhead? Is it expensive to do this?

Well, no, actually it’s as inexpensive as it can possibly be. There is no server software required. No “Microsoft Extensions” are needed to display database records and images. Your web site is as clean and simple as it can possibly get. You pay nothing for “development” since there is essentially nothing to develop.

If you want more sophisticated features such as a shopping cart or other interactive functionality, you’ll find that most of these features already exist elsewhere as separate, callable modules. For example, a number of services provide free shopping cart modules. The HTML can be cut and pasted right into BwWeb and it will include it in every composed page.

Why re-design the wheel and have to pay money for the privilege? There are also many excellent free search engines available (such as Atomz, PicoSearch and others) that can easily be set up to perform fast text searches on your pages. You can have the equivalent of a searchable database at zero cost and the results are splendid. By the way, the two companies I mentioned place a small logo on your search result pages if you use the free service, but there are no advertisements added. You can have an extremely fast, efficient searchable web site set up and running in a matter of minutes.

At the very least, if you still want a web programmer to set up a “custom” site and pay the extra money, fine — you can present him/her with a ready-to-publish set of web pages describing your inventory and still save yourself a bundle. You don’t have to worry about “import/export formats” — there aren’t any! You can put as many records on a page as you like, lay them out however you want, present images in a very professional manner, even include automatic links to display them full size. In a nutshell, you can do most if not all of the things you’ll find on web sites that cost their owners thousands of dollars to produce.

How about maintenance? Is it more difficult to maintain separate pages than a single database file?

Normally, yes, but in this case, No, definitely not. That’s one of the beautiful things about this program. If you update a few records and choose to update the corresponding web page(s), you do not have to upload huge database files merely to update a few records. Instead, you upload only the page(s) that have changed. Plus, your images can live anywhere on the web — you do not need to “marry” your images with a resident database server, which many database-hosting systems require. Your records exist as simple pages that you can edit or delete at any time.

In effect, you have complete freedom to locate your files wherever you like. If you decide to make changes to your pages, you are faced with a simple task instead of a complicated one. Simply make the desired changes to your record(s) and then re-compose only the page(s) you want to replace. A huge amount of time is saved over the traditional “Front Page” approach of making changes to “master” pages and then being compelled to edit (and test) all of the subsequent branches in your web.

Also, keep in mind that I’m not recommending that dealers should do this INSTEAD of using listing services — I’m suggesting that they should do it IN ADDITION TO using listing services.

You mentioned marrying images with database records. Will BookWriter Web do this automatically?

Yes, it will. All you have to do is be sure to name your image files in a certain way, then tell BwWeb where the files are. It automatically scans the images and matches them up to the database records. BookMaster, Record Manager, BookMate and HomeBase users can now compose complete image-populated pages without having to do anything other than what I just described.

What about auctions? How does one use BookWriter Web to compose auctions?

In practice, there are three things that take a lot of time to produce a good auction: (1) composing the presentation, (2) creating a good auction title that fits into the space allowed, and (3) choosing the best auction category. BookWriter Web will do the first two automatically. The code it produces can be dropped right into Mr. Lister or whatever auction software you choose, and it contains a flexible Auction Title Composer that intelligently constructs titles based on the fields you specify. It works pretty well, too. My own tests here have seen auction productivity skyrocket as a result of using it to perform these two labor-intensive chores.

There are many dealers who know nothing about HTML or web sites. Is this complicated to do? How would a dealer go about setting up a web site as you’ve described?

Everyone does things somewhat differently, and style is a major component when establishing an on-line business identity. BookWriter Web both expects and encourages creativity. Getting started is easy: You can use any of the example templates and document layouts supplied with BwWeb to organize your information the way you want it in a general fashion. You can then save the template and layout as your own files and customize them precisely the way you want them to “fine tune” your on-line presentation. BwWeb lets you instantly preview the results in partial or complete form, so there is never a need to “upload and review” as is normally the case with most web pages — your uploaded files will look exactly the same when viewed on-line.

In general, all you need to have is the web site itself. Once you have a place to send files, that’s really all you need. The rest is handled by the pages themselves. It is honestly just that simple.

What else will BookWriter Web do?

Well, it creates catalogs, quotes, tabular index documents, detailed records, sorted lists, delimited files for uploading to Amazon and Half.com, HTML for use in eBay auctions, archival records — the list goes on and on. You can even use it to create UIEE files that are ready to upload. It’s all a matter of setting up what you want to create, and I’ve spent a lot of effort trying to make that very easy to do. You can basically set up an infinite number of layouts and compositions and save them for use later. And, since it always saves your current settings automatically, the program is always just the way you left it the next time you run it.

I’ve also tried to include practical features that dealers will find genuinely useful. For example, there are some automatic editing options that will remove spurious punctuation, strip leading articles and things like that. These are admittedly details, but they can also add up to a lot of wasted time if you have to go back and hand-edit documents. BwWeb is targeted towards producing ready-to-use results.

Is the program complicated to operate?

This program is unlike anything I’ve ever produced. I’ve been told it looks a bit intimidating at first glance, but I think that’s because there’s a lot packed into a small area. I wanted a program that was right in front of me in toto, not hidden behind two dozen sub-menus. The learning curve is pretty short, given that you can start composing immediately by using the examples we’ve included. I’ve put a lot of work into laying the program out sensibly. There is a comprehensive Help system that describes the entire program in detail and how to use it. There’s even a Tutor that literally walks you through the entire program, describing what each control does and how it can affect your composition. My mother has no trouble operating it.

What about technical support. What happens when a dealer needs help?

E-mail support is provided at no cost to all users. We’re pretty good about responding quickly to inquiries and we take them seriously (though I’ve personally gotten behind in my correspondence lately). Additional pay-as-you-go support is available for dealers with more involved issues. We’ll also be offering pager-based flat-rate and long-term support services for dealers who wish to develop custom applications or who want someone “on call” to help when problems arise.

What does BookWriter Web cost?

We’re offering the program for $79.95 through December 31, 2002. Dealers who subsequently decide to order the complete BookWriter program will receive full credit towards their purchase through December 31.

Where can dealers go to find out more information?

Dealers can visit http://home.rochester.rr.com/bdunique/bwweb/bookwriterweb.htm for additional information and a link to order the software. The Alibris-compatible version is available now and it has been tested extensively. As I mentioned earlier, a HomeBase version will also be ready shortly. We’ll be issuing some announcements at the appropriate times, when I have completed software in hand, ready to install.

Tom, this is really very exciting. I appreciate your sharing this with us!

Thank you. It was my privilege to participate.

™ BookWriter is a trademark of TAS Software Innovations © UIEE is Copyright 1989-2002 TAS Software Innovations ™ BookMaster, BookMate, Interloc, and Record Manager are trademarks of Alibris ™ HomeBase is a trademark of Advanced Book Exchange Inc.

#Software

Charles Vilnis – BookRouter & Allusive Information Systems

URLS: http://www.allusys.com and http://www.bookrouter.com

When Shirley Bryant approached me with a request to do an interview for the IOBA’s The Standard newsletter, it forced me to reflect on what it is my colleagues and I do at Allusive Information Systems and how we got here to be doing it….

From personal experience, I can tell you that book dealers and computer people are very much alike – generally independent, a bit eccentric and definitely passionate about the ingredients of their respective vocations. Just as book dealers do much more than simply buy and sell books, computer folks do a whole lot more than simply sit and code, or create computer systems for clients. The world of books and the world of computers exist – both cultures of communication.

I began as a citizen of the world of books….

After a stint in New York working for a Japanese trading company where I could use my Japanese language skills acquired in college to a practical end, I moved to northern California in 1975. I was working as a finish carpenter in 1977 when an acquaintance asked me to become his partner in a small used bookshop in a small apple town where the freight trains still ran down the main street (called Main Street, by the way) on their way to the cannery. The day I came by to talk to him, he gave me a set of keys and put my name on the checking account. Suddenly I was a book person – a full partner in a business that had grossed almost $14,000 the year before!

Most instances of autobiography now turn to the enormous success that followed – fortune and the respect of colleagues accumulating through the years – the subject turning back in self-satisfaction to consider a life well led…

In my case, I would have to say that, while I hope I have gained at least some regard from my colleagues and learned a little bit about the craft of dealing in the books of East Asia, what I really found that day over 25 years ago was a passion, a love for books and for the world of books. I did become a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association in 1980 (at a time when the ABAA was full of young booksellers in their late 20’s to their early 40’s). A few years later, I moved to Boston and became involved in the life of Helen Kelly and her business, the Boston Book Co., founded in the 1970’s. It was Helen who gave me the chance to see what a large urban book business could be and who opened my eyes to the joys of domestic life – we married and had a son in the late 1980’s.

Helen had one of the first computers in the old book trade: In 1982, she bought an original IBM PC with specifications laughable by today’s standards – but it was top of the line (with a hard drive, no less) and cost her about $10,000! Not so laughable a sum then. Soon after I merged my book business into hers, I became involved in the care and feeding of that by then venerable PC and its successors – then creating a network…..I was hooked.

Helen had introduced me to my second passion – the world of computers.

Helen had equipped that original PC back in 1982 with Bookease – Marc Younger’s professional bookseller’s package, built on DOS, which he had created for his own bookseller wife Helen in the same year. By the early to mid-90’s I had become Boston Book Company’s information technology department – our computer network had grown – we had gone far beyond the first PC to the blistering speed of the 486! Marc had succeeded in creating a version of Bookease that networked well and stably, we had bought a commercial space specifically for our rare books. Our book business was prospering… we cranked out catalogues, published lists and I personally had also become our Asian book department of one and was doing a land-office business with Japan.

But off on the horizon, no bigger than a man’s hand, a dark cloud was churning. The Japanese market was in decline; that was clear. Techno-friends were starting to talk about the growth of a “network of networks” called the internet and I decided to take a look. By 1992 I had an email address and a shell account so I could start exploring the ‘net (not via the Web, though, it was too early for that –I didn’t even use Windows….). But even in my halting fashion, I found my way in cyberspace and what I found astonished me: the internet was full of librarians!

Viewed from the near side of the dot-com divide, the internet of those days seems quite quaint. Even folks with “com” domains were careful to give as little offense as possible to the dominant anti-commercial culture. The ‘net was for the exchange of information – if you wanted to share bibliographical information as a bookseller with your colleagues and with the library and academic worlds, that was fine, but booksellers should not flog their wares.

But soon there was an accelerating move to make more than pure information available over the ‘net – fueled largely by the splashy, graphics-heavy and user-friendly World Wide Web. By 1993, Boston Book Company was on the Web and by early 1994 we had established a searchable database of our wares there. Interloc was still a Bulletin Board Service not open to the public, ABE and Bibliofind were just stirring, Amazon had only burned through their first few millions – spring was in the air.

As the dot.com boom evolved in the mid to late 1990’s it became clear to me and many of our colleagues that the easy answers for marketing that the Web seemed to provide for small businesses like ours were not an unmixed blessing. Bibliofind, ABE, AntiQbook in Europe, Interloc (later Alibris) and soon many other sites were jostling each other for a piece of the pie – trying to lure dealers to post their listings and to draw eyes to view them as well. And just like that we all seemed to get bulldozed by big money – folks you would never expect it of were suddenly interested in books. Capital was being poured into the process – relatively big fish were being swallowed by bigger fish in the internet world – Bibliofind was grabbed by Amazon which had discovered a sudden interest in old books and ways to market them and Interloc became Alibris absorbing Bibliocity, hoping to create a whole new market for old books by raising their visibility through the pages of the New Yorker…. It was a strange time.

There seemed to be a two-fold attack on our way of life. On the one hand, it was clear that money was trying to take over the old book world – whether that was sensible or not, whether there could be any reasonable return for the outlay of cash required to get noticed on Wall Street. One could foresee a future in which old book dealers would become glorified scouts for the various huge marketing venues. Not the sort of future most of the book people I knew relished.

The second attack (or just plain change, to be more neutral about it) was a revolution in our day-to-day activities. Traditionally there had been a “food chain” in the old book biz – at least since the demise of the truly great generalist booksellers – dealers sold to other dealers up that chain, retailing to their own customers along the way and wholesaling to specialists or those with more savvy about marketing at the high end. The romance of the vagabond bookseller hunting for gold on the less-traveled roads of America was being written every day, even just a few years ago. Yet the growing access to information (and misinformation, alas) over the internet meant lots of people knew lots more about books and markets than ever before, and the out-of-the way bookshops got much less remote. In the meantime, the multiplication of electronic venues, and the growing need for sophistication in all things digital, meant that there was less time for actually handling the books we all love…. Our customers, who had relied on us for expertise, were going to the search sites or to Amazon, to find information certainly, but more often to find stuff cheaper.

Ironically, the computer, which was supposed to make everything easier, ended up on the verge of separating us from our wares, making us work harder and maybe even making it harder to make a living.

The old book world responded with a whole raft of marketing solutions – ideas like the IOBA, high-end venues like WorldBookDealers, the ABAA/ILAB website and search engine, the joint ownership represented by TomFolio, etc. Each was an effort to reclaim the old book world from the new giants. We had all seen too clearly the utter demise of the independent new book dealers. No one wanted to follow them.

I supported all those efforts as best I could, but there had to be an answer from the computer side of things, as well. In that atmosphere, I decided to try and create some tools that would make it easier to interact with the brave new world of bibliospace, to alleviate some of the new drudge work that our friend, the computer, had created for us. As a member of Boston Book Co., I felt I was a good position to understand the joys and pains of 1990’s bookselling – we operated a used bookshop near the BU campus, and had a rare book operation in Jamaica Plain, a Boston neighborhood. At the rare shop we handled general antiquarian items, but we also pursued a fairly serious specialization in the world of Japanese books. In short, because of our internal diversity, whatever we could create to help us at the Boston Book Co. would probably help many of our colleagues, as well.

If I turned to my book business for inspiration and experience, I turned to my next-door neighbor for digital muscle. My neighbor, Mark, is a very skilled database developer with over 20 years experience in creating database tools for hospitals and educational institutions. He and I started to discuss the idea of using the internet not merely as a marketing medium but also as a foundation for helping booksellers more easily control their businesses as well. Our talks, at first theoretical and purely speculative, soon became very practical and, by early 1999, we had formed an LLC: Allusive Information Systems. Mark quit his job and came on board as a full-time in-house developer.

Over the course of those conversations, we developed a set of principles that would be the underlying theory of Allusive. Allusive was set up to fill a niche in the old book world, to develop a set of answers to some problems that I had learned about too clearly as a bookseller.

First of all, as computer people, we had to learn to listen to the customer, to the bookseller. Technical people tend to see the world in terms of their own latest technical “fad” – they are excited by the new, want to explore the “bleeding edge” of technology. We were determined not to prejudge a solution by its technical “sexiness” alone. What works, works.

On the other hand, it is true that clients and especially booksellers who aren’t computer literate have a certain Luddite strain (which I don’t entirely disagree with) that has to be dealt with. Sometimes the old way of doing things has simply gotten too complicated. I often find that booksellers use a Rube Goldbergian mess of structures, techniques and equipment that has evolved in response to practical needs as they have changed over time, which “works”, kinda, but which is so inefficient that it isn’t making economic sense for the business.

The result of those two problems is that booksellers are sometimes stuck with systems that are either alien and unusable or antiquated and overly complicated. In both cases, the systems are further compromised by being unreliable. And where do you find somebody to help you fix a problem at a moments notice? If your technical “faddist” moves to Peru, who will understand what latest gizmo he or she has equipped you with? On the other hand, if your system is a crazy quilt of operating systems and older equipment, who can pull it all back together when it falls apart?

Mark and I came up with the notion of creating a “toolbox” of software, both for the dealer’s office and for use over the internet. We figured that the basic task of the bookseller was the creation, storage, conversion and transfer of information. The average bookseller has data that they need to store and have access to – book records, sales records, wants, etc., etc.

Most everybody has some sort of database that they use for helping them with that – a software replacement for the raw memory skills and the many, many index cards we all once used (and once had, in the case of memory skills). Those databases are sometimes brewed at home out of Access or a spreadsheet or Filemaker Pro. Alternatively, there have been dedicated bookseller programs around for many years: Bookease, Homebase, BookTrakker, BookHound, etc., etc. Some were built from scratch, some on a base of Access or Filemaker – all useful as far as they went. It was the integration of those existing tools with the internet, and the growing marketing opportunity the internet represented, that we wanted to aim at.

It was at that point in 1999 that an interesting practical circumstance arose that put a point on our need to come up with tools for integration. I had been friends with Marc Younger, the developer or Bookease, for many years. He had handed over the maintenance of Bookease to other people soon after developing some simple tools for exporting internet-ready files out of it in the mid-1990s. The handover was not a success and became a classic case of the two failings we were seeing: too much tech on one hand, too little service on the other. The first group that took over Bookease for DOS meant well but never seemed to be around when there were problems or questions from the Bookease booksellers. In despair, Marc made an arrangement with another developer on the west coast – this fellow decided to rebuild Bookease from scratch as a Windows program on an Access foundation. Bookease had been brilliantly conceived by Marc and was a very stable and expandable piece of software built on a Foxpro foundation. Access, on the other hand, is not a foundation for a mission-critical business environment – at least not as it was used in the new “Bookease Pro” for Windows.

The results were instability, loss of data, bookseller recriminations and the new developer’s disappearance from the scene. Bookease Pro was in shambles and Bookease Plus for DOS, while humming merrily along, was running into a limit we all saw in the late 1990’s – the Y2K dilemma. Bookease for DOS needed an update desperately and time was running out.

It was at that point that Marc Younger came to us, and asked if we at Allusive might take over the maintenance of Bookease for DOS. Though it seemed a bit far afield from our primary mission of building all new tools, I saw it as an opportunity to establish a relationship with a whole group of longtime computer users who still used the old Bookease program, and an acid test for our ability to integrate the old and the new with software “bridges.”

In late 1999 we set up a Y2K upgrade system, contacted those many Bookease DOS users who had been languishing a bit since the mid-90’s, created a service contract system and Y2K converted every dealer who wanted to sign up before the January 1 witching hour. It was a great experience, an early success, and it taught us a lot about where we should be going. It was also the genesis of the online data conversion system that would become BookRouter.

As I mentioned, Bookease had a rudimentary capability to export book records in UIEE format, which had originally been developed by Tom Sawyer of the then Interloc as a lingua franca for the transfer of book data. That was great as far as it went; one could log on to the various indexing sites and upload the export files, or one could use email to send an attachment to a few of the sites, or send by FTP, or…. There were many ways to keep up – too many it seemed and I–and many of my Bookease customers–was spending one heck of a lot of time creating formats and logging on and sending by email, and it didn’t seem to make much sense.

It was in that environment that my database-savvy neighbor and I put aside the development of yet another online search site, and decided to create a universal online data converter which could take pretty much whatever text-based data that was thrown at it, convert it to an appropriate format for the various indexing sites and send it on. We also thought it would be good if we could do things to the book records on the fly…. Perhaps the dealer would only want to send books over $100 to one of their sites – or perhaps they wanted to have an instant “sale” by lowering prices, or they wanted to add an html link to their homesite to each and every record. We (or should I say Mark) created a “swiss army knife” data converter online at http://www.bookrouter.com and our first “bridge tool,” the prototype for the whole concept, was born. BookRouter went public in mid-2000. It has gone through many changes and improvements since, but the original simple idea remains the same: Upload once to us and we will take care of the rest – including all the toing and froing and talking to the sites when a mistake occurs. We wanted BookRouter to become the ultimate time-saver. At first customers were skeptical – it was really quite easy to upload files after all, and it didn’t seem to take much time – skeptical until they realized just how much time they really had been spending now that they weren’t spending it anymore.

The Bookease experience also showed that there really was a need for a multi-tiered approach to the in-house bookseller software dilemma. Bookease DOS had been built on a state-of -the art foundation that was very robust, but the platform was creaky now and it was clear that a lot of functions (direct export of data to emails, for one, “assisted cataloguing” like Homebase’s ISBN lookup, for another) that were so necessary for modern commerce could not be added via DOS. But the Bookease Pro disaster showed that simple conversion of Bookease functionality into a Windows-based environment was not the answer by itself. A “one-size-fits-all” mentality wouldn’t work where some folks were dealing with thousands and others potentially millions of book records. New thinking was needed. We had to look around for new systems, new approaches.

We had been using a Linux data server at Boston Company for many years. Linux was free, or close to it, and it was incredibly stable and bulletproof, as well. It networked well with Windows and made it possible to set up data server boxes separate from the rest of the Windows network and thus protect against the data corruption that came from inevitable Windows crashes. In addition, hardware had gotten so cheap that there wasn’t too much economic pain involved in setting up those Linux servers, as well. Any “entry-level” machine off the shelf was more than capable of doing the job. Over the course of time, I have set up a number of Bookease users with whole new systems – integrating their old hardware with a new box that hummed along – delivering data. It was almost comical – I would stop by a client’s shop to deal with some problem or another or just to check in – and the server would be running perfectly. I would reboot it just since I was there anyway. There are data servers at some of my clients’ places that are only rebooted once or twice a year.

So we had grown busier – besides the toolbox business, as exemplified by BookRouter, we were also doing systems consulting, taking care of all the Bookease DOS users, setting up hardware/software networks, consulting on equipment acquisitions (we have found that most folks overspend on hardware because they are insecure about what they really need), etc. Help was necessary. Especially since early in 2001, Mark, having built BookRouter and the online search engine, got an offer from MIT he could not refuse.

We brought in a part-time developer, Steve Clay, to take care of further work with BookRouter and the search engine on a consult basis. In addition, we hired an office manager, first Cathy, then BJ – who sends out bills to our customers and makes sure at least some of us get paid. We added Scott Pezza to take care of customer service. He is the one who fields questions, sets up new clients, writes conversion scripts for the occasional exotic data format beyond the reach of even BookRouter’s built-in tools – in short, he is the glue that holds the day-to-day operation of BookRouter together. And he is a gifted developer as well. Over the last many months, he has been hard at work creating a new tool for the toolbox: He has written an order management system which integrates and organizes all the email orders from the various online listing services – puts them into a coherent form, generates reports, creates packing lists and invoices, keeps track of clients, etc., etc. All this can be done either locally over an intranet or over the internet when the user is away from home. We haven’t come up with a name for this analogue to BookRouter, a Swiss army knife for orders, the results of our labors, but we are thinking about one – for now it is just “OMW” – Order Management Web.

We are refining the online search mechanism, which now exists in-house as a database of our BookRouter users. Soon we will be offering that database “backend” as a feature to our BookRouter clients: they will be able to search their own inventories from their own websites without potential customers being diverted into the ordering systems of the indexing services. The search results, logo, colors and all, will appear to come straight from the dealer’s own search engine.

We have outsourced development work on the successor to Bookease DOS to a group of programmers in Europe and further east and are working closely with them to dot the “i”‘s and cross the “t”‘s. The program is called Biblioware and it is a total departure from the standard in-house bookseller’s database program. It has a front-end with all the bells and whistles derived from the best of the bookseller programs, a user interface that can potentially plug into any modern database you please – whether it be our home grown Java data backend that will allow the Java version of Biblioware to be totally self-contained and totally compatible with any operating system, or a heavy-duty Linux/Unix/NT database for heavy lifting client/server operation, for people with thoughts of putting a million book records online.

Carrying the “toolbox” idea even further, we are also working with a fellow who has created a wonderful assisted cataloguing system that is at least as accurate as Homebase’s ISBN lookup feature, but which will also allow the lookup of older, pre-ISBN material, as well. Its functionality will be integrated into Biblioware, the successor to Bookease DOS, but it will also be “modular” so that it can integrate with any bookseller’s program out there. One needn’t have to convert to a whole new system like our Biblioware or stick to an essentially “light-duty” database like Homebase in order to derive the benefits of assisted cataloguing technology.

Obviously, even with outsourcing some development, we are going to need more hands to make all this work. Scott needs an assistant, I need an assistant, we need an extra full-time developer on staff – the wish list is long. We “come in” in the morning (sometimes we log in from far away, actually), clear up any problems re Bookease or BookRouter first thing, then start to work on toolbox projects or in setting up connections with new customers or new indexing sites. We have, in the past, had to create entire new programs to allow bulk uploads to Amazon or Half – there is never a dull moment at Allusive Information.

Finally, we are always looking for new ideas from our book-selling colleagues. We are committed to making this “computer thing” work for all of us, not just for the ones with the money or technical savvy to bulldoze their way to a solution. So far we have created BookRouter, which we are very proud of as a tool for reducing the day-to-day drudgery of the online bookseller. We have set up a stable maintenance contract environment for all the Bookease DOS users still out there. And we are hard at work on a whole group of new capabilities or tools – centered around the new bookseller’s program called Biblioware, but consisting of a group of universally adaptable modules: the order management system, the assisted cataloguing system, the online search engine. All of these will follow the BookRouter model of being universal and adaptable to as many legacy systems as possible. It all sounds very complicated, but, hopefully, the complication is under the surface where the user never sees it. Take one, or take them all, the tools are created to make things just a little bit easier and more simple for the bookseller client.

With that, I think I have to say goodbye to you all. This essay ended up being a lot longer and a bit more technical than I thought it would be when I started. I am always ready to field any questions that anyone might have about what we are about, but for now, from Scott, BJ, Steve, our European friends and myself, I would like to wish all of you in the world of books heartfelt best wishes from the world of computers.

#databases #Software